The notion of states as "laboratories of democracy" is generally credited to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country," Brandeis, the court's liberal lion, wrote in a dissent to a 1932 decision.
One wonders what Brandeis would make of Mississippi today.
